Dithering or Scared?

For three days, Corps officials had lamented the difficulty of gaining access to the canal, but yesterday a local contractor, Boh Bros. Construction Co., apparently drove to the mouth of the canal and started placing a set of steel sheet pilings to isolate the canal from the lake. This job was finished yesterday afternoon.

What’s the deal? Aren’t engineers usually pretty good at figuring out how to get into inaccessible places?

I wonder if maybe they were actually all askeered of the roving thugs that seem to have been reported everywhere, but rarely seen? A number of reports in today’s newspapers are much more skeptical of the criminal anarchy that was reported all day yesterday. It was more than a little bit odd that the news crews that had access all over the city weren’t able to get any pictures of these roving gangs of beasts that were said to be stalking everyone.

It’s not that I doubt that there was a lot of criminal activity. People both evil and desperate become barbaric when the social order breaks down. But the stories sound an awful lot like the tall tales we’ve heard for centuries in this country about barbaric slave revolts. It’s like a tick that comes back whenever people see large numbers of poor, angry black people.

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